2. Copy Protection

Unfortunately, those activities are no longer legal. Or to be more
specific, such activities are illegal unless the content provider
gives you permission. For example, the record company might say that
making a copy of CD is illegal, but they may offer to provide you with
low-quality digital tracks that can only be played on a single
computer. (That is the approach taken by some existing copy-protected
CDs.) The important point is that rights that used to be unconditional
are now only granted to us at the content provider's discretion.

http:/­/­mp3.about.com/­library/­weekly/­aa090301.htm"The record labels have a legitimate fear, and the intellectual
property rights of artists need to be protected. The problem is that
the new technology takes away what had once been regarded as a
fundamental right of consumers to make copies of their own music."

One of the critical pieces of the new copyright legislation is
something called "anti-circumvention". In the language of copyright
law, "circumvention" refers to the act of foiling any copy protection
that a CD or e-book might have. What's shocking about the new
copyright laws is the fact that they make it illegal to distribute any
technology that might be used for circumvention, even if that
technology could also be used to exercise your legal rights!

For example, you have the legal right to possess a copy of a song in
order to play it in your car stereo; but if your CD is copy-protected,
it is a crime to circumvent the copy-protection in order to
make the copy. So your right to possess the copy is useless
because you have no way to exercise it. Anti-circumvention trumps your
fair use rights.

By making circumvention technologies illegal even when they have
legitimate uses, the new copyright laws place us at the mercy of the
content companies. Even if we have a theoretical right to make a copy
of a TV show, we have to circumvent copy protection in order to
exercise that right. The circumvention is illegal even though
we're performing the circumvention for legal purposes! This loophole
gives the content industries unprecedented power over how citizens use
information, and it dramatically alters the balance that our laws
used to preserve.

http:/­/­www.nytimes.com/­2001/­08/­13/­technology/­ebusiness/­13NECO.html"The law also makes it illegal for individuals to use such a program
-- even to make a back-up copy of a book or movie or song for
themselves, the type of copies traditionally allowed under copyright
law. That is where the double bind comes in. Actually making such
copies for personal use is not illegal. But it is against the law to
break through the copy-protection measure to make the legal copies."

http:/­/­www.foreignpolicy.com/­issue_novdec_2001/­lessig.html"A copyright protection technology is just code that controls access
to copyrighted material. But that code can restrict access more
effectively (and certainly less subtly) than copyright law does. Often
the desire to crack protection systems is nothing more than a desire
to exercise what is sometimes called a fair-use right over the
copyrighted material. Yet the DMCA bans that technology, regardless of
its ultimate effect."

You can today, but you may not be able to if the entertainment
industry has its way.

Digital copy protection works only on digital content, so today it
is possible to convert digital content into analog form, thereby
evading copy controls (for both legal and illegal purposes). But a
stated goal of the MPAA is to convince Congress to require all
media devices to include "watermarking" technology. This technology
would be able to detect copyright information even if a song or
movie has been converted from digital to analog and back again. A
device with watermarking support could therefore prevent all
forms of copying, even simply putting a microphone in front of your
speaker!

http:/­/­www.pcworld.com/­news/­article/­0,aid,97464,00.asp"Currently, analog outputs from PC speakers, for example, can be
easily recorded because analog data cannot be tracked. Parsons
described a watermark encryption system, essentially an identifying
'marking' system, intended to safeguard against such forms of
piracy."

No. Even before circumvention technologies were outlawed, it was still
illegal to steal music or movies. Many legal scholars believe that the
DMCA goes too far in attempting to prevent theft.

For example, Napster would have still been shut down even if
circumvention technology was legal. (Ironically, Napster used the DMCA
in its defense -- the very same copyright law that criminalizes
anti-circumvention!)

We could just as well ask how we prevent other crimes such as
jaywalking, tax fraud, or even murder. Society prevents dangerous
activities by passing laws that make such activities illegal and by
punishing people who break the laws.

In contrast, the recent copyright legislation attempts to prevent
dangerous activities by criminalizing all technologies that could
possibly be used in a dangerous way. To see how strange this is,
consider what would happen if we took a similar approach to preventing
murder. Guns can be used to commit murder, so of course we would
outlaw them. So can knives; no matter that there are plenty of legal
uses for knives, it's the illegal ones that matter so we would have to
ban them too. While we're at it, cars can be used to escape from the
scene, so we should outlaw cars as well... You get the idea.

Definitely not. There are many legitimate uses for circumvention
technology. For example, law professor Lawrence Lessig notes that
circumvention technology could be used to allow blind readers to
extract the text from an electronic book so that the text can be read
out loud. Other legitimate uses include moving a book from one place
to another, listening to a song in your car stereo, or saving a
television show to watch it later.

Circumvention is also critical for the pursuit of research. Scientists
are unable to expose flaws in computer programs if copy protection
prevents them from examining the computer code. And scientists cannot
research encryption if the act of researching becomes a crime.

http:/­/­www.foreignpolicy.com/­issue_novdec_2001/­lessig.html"Russian programmer Dimitry Sklyarov, for example, wrote code to crack
Adobe's eBook technology in order to enable users to move eBooks from
one machine to another and to give blind consumers the ability to
'read' out loud the books they purchased."

We are proposing a Consumer Technology Bill of
Rights for digital content. This bill is a positive assertion
of the rights of citizens to use content that they have legally
acquired. Our Bill of Rights will not make it any easier for criminals
to steal digital media. It will not deprive artists of the rights to
their works. It will simply restore the rights that we citizens used
to have before the passage of the DMCA.